The Pace of Political Evil

US politics has lost its civility. Civility kept progress on the Conservative agenda slow, and it created time and opportunity for opposition response. In recent years, this pressure has intensified in speed and scope, making it hard to respond effectively in any civil way.

Trump is not the only player in this. Others, working patiently over decades, laid a foundation that was ripe for the arrival of someone like him. The system has been weakened over time. Gerrymandering, the Citizens United ruling, and the stacking of the Supreme Court are examples.

But Trump has been a definite innovator in the sociopathic governance space. His two primary innovations, either one of which would be sufficient to explain the reverence of the rich and power-hungry, have been:

1. 

   The outright shredding of shame, and the important social safeguard that shame had previously provided. Prior to this, there were a great many things no politician would dare try because of fear of being found out; Trump showed that fear to be a waste of time. Far too many voters are willing to turn a blind eye to shameful behavior that comes from a politician that otherwise serves them, which has allowed the GOP to very rapidly morph into the Party of Machiavelli.

2. The observation that massive numbers of voters don't check truth or consistency. Prior to this, politicians feared injuring their own supporters, which led to a natural reserve in how nasty a policy could be; Trump has shown that it's a productive strategy to create policies actively hurtful to one's own base, who will notice the pain but not bother to find out where it comes from, preferring to just be blindly angry, without direction, and to just wait to be told by tribal leaders who they should be angry at.

The consequences of these shifts are legion, far too numerous to discuss here in detail, but they include corrupt behavior to acquire and keep office, and the open incitement of and condoning of political violence, even to include outright insurrection. These also include ever more blatant acts of judicial activism by a questionably seated and plainly corrupt majority of the Supreme Court. Openly scornful of any suggestion that they be bound by an ethics code, they are apparently bent on taking a buzz saw to long-standing readings of the Constitution in favor of uglier ends—probably to include the present trend of the Republican party toward White Christian Nationalism.

The basic problem is that the founders did not anticipate this speed and scope. The safeguards they built in were few, and the presumption was that the system would be self-correcting, patching small holes on a one-off basis as they came up. The Supreme Court was designed for perhaps a challenge or two per Presidential term. Even if it was still functioning in a properly ethical way, it would not be up to the present onslaught of challenges—as I had warned about in a tweet on ex-Twitter a month before the 2016 election:

"Trump…involved in a startling 3,500 legal actions".

Visualize 3,500 Constitutional challenges by a #bully #President flexing his muscles. https://t.co/6HffNXKA7y

— Kent Pitman 🌎 (@KentPitman) October 13, 2016

 

---

Author's Note:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

The graphics were created at abacus.ai via its ChatLLM facility.

The prompt for the paperwork graphic, created by FLUX.1 was "create a black and white graphic that shows someone with a xerox machine that is rapidly spewing out legal documents in the direction of a model of the supreme court". I'm not sure what I expected as a result of that. A smaller court building, for one. But I guess this was sort of responsive.

The prompt for the shame graphic, created by DALL-E, was "create a simple black and white graphic sketched graphic of a man whose face is vaguely like donald trump, but feeling shame with one hand over his face and the other hand extended into the foreground, palm up and out, in a stop gesture intended to hold nearby people at bay." You can see it ignored parts of my request.

Kamala uninterviewed?

This will be a gripe of short-lived relevance, but I still wanted to say it out loud because there are other themes implicated that have more enduring nature.

About the Harris candidacy, I keep seeing:

“Harris has yet to give an interview…”

As if that's some kind of gotcha that shows weakness, fear, or lack of validity.

She's not exactly hiding. Barely more than a month ago, she was advocating for Biden. All of a sudden, she is thrust into a situation that was not anticipated. She has done extraordinarily, being at once a Vice President and a candidate, charged with assembling a team, approving preliminary messages, selecting her own Vice President after numerous interviews, syncing up on messaging with Walz, preparing presentations for the convention, and surely meeting with a zillion people who have competing theories of how she should spend her very limited time.

I don't know about you, but that's more than I get done in a month.

Not to mention the fact that her job up until now has not been to make policy but to support Biden's policy. It will probably take her a little while to work out how to articulate a strategy of her own, and how to present it in a way that is respectful of the fact that she's still Biden's VP.

All to say it doesn't look to me like ducking anything. It looks like walking straight into a firehose. While it will be interesting to hear an interview, I write off any delay as saying there are only so many waking hours in a day. Few people have assembled a campaign at all in that time, much less one with this amount of momentum. I think she's doing great.

But it's equally reasonable to note that an interview is really not going to shed any more light. It's a form of outreach to be sure, but there aren't secrets that are likely to be uncovered in that way. The people who are against her are hoping there will be a gotcha moment, but I think her policies to the extent that she has them formed yet, are on display. At this point we are trusting values, because that is what this election is about.

I am not a Democrat, but an Independent. By that I mean that I don't vote on anything or anyone just because I'm part of some tribe, I think things through. And I would be writing this same essay if it was Liz Cheney running and she had not sat down for an interview. I know enough about her and her values from what she stood up for in the Jan 6 hearings to know Democracy would be safe under her. I would be unwaveringly saying the same thing as I'm saying about Harris right now: democracy is on the line, and that matters more than anything.

So if you know anything about me, and there's no reason you should—I'm just a random guy with an opinion, you know that climate is in fact my top priority. And that I disagree with Kamala on some really material things about climate, mostly urgency. And she used to be against fracking and seems to have moderated. That's not great. But it doesn't change my unconditional support for her one iota.

Because if Trump is elected, there will be…

• no discussion of science,
• no chance for climate at all,
• no civil rights,
• no protective government agencies,
• no part of government, nor property entrusted to it, that is not for sale,
• no safety for anyone gay,
• no safety for women,
• no safety for people of color,
• no freedom of religion,
• no dignity for the elderly,
• no respect for injured or fallen heroes,
• no respect for people with disabilities,
• no real safety for anyone who is not straight, white, male, young, and rich,
• no safeguards for the environment,
• no workplace safety,
• no employment safety and fairness standards,
• no sane public health policy,
• no chance for fair elections in future elections.

Whatever I might think about Harris—or even Cheney in my hypothetical—and her policies, seems small compared to worrying that democracy is secure. And, believe me, I would disagree with Cheney way more than Harris. But my point is that small partisan matters are not the issue right now, and even large partisan matters are dwarfed by the threat to democracy. Partisan reasons are not the reason to cast a ballot one way or another. Not this year.

Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy. There should be no higher priority than making sure he does not become US president.

We'll be lucky if the cancer that Trump has planted does not cause a bunch of people to challenge election results without basis and then have the morally compromised Supreme Court that he has stacked approve such antics, completing a procedural coup.

Serious damage has been done to our democracy, and it is limping along as it is. A strong showing for Harris and a Democratic Congress is a chance to have enough time to mend some things.

Otherwise, it's probably game over for US democracy, and a short road from there to game over for the world against climate change as petro-state dictators gain an edge at a terribly bad time.

Any attempt to suggest that Harris needs to sit down and discuss something in more detail completely misses the point and makes no sense to me.

• Democracy, not autocracy.
• Hope, not fear.
• Joy, not anger.
• Acceptance, not division.
• Lawfulness, not lawlessness.
• Constitution, not bullies.

Those are the things Harris stands for, and you aren't going to learn anything materially different from that in an interview. It'll be quite interesting to hear what she says in an interview, but she is not derelict for not having sat down for an interview. We have enough information for now, so let's cut her some slack. She should be getting credit for managing priorities well enough to give us the important things first. That bodes well for the future.

 

---

Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This essay originated as a post on Mastodon. It has been edited to fit the richer format of this venue, and somewhat edited to include additional content not in the original post, so you could think of that post as an initial draft.

The image was created by so-called “generative AI” via Abacus.AI and its interface to the FLUX.1 facility via a chat interface. I'm not sure how happy I am about the idea of these tools, but find myself needing to learn how they work, so I figured I'd use this as an experiment to see how they work. The prompt I used to get this graphic was:

“Make a graphic in black and white that shows, in silhouette form, two people sitting in comfortable chairs, facing each other. One of the people, the person to the right as we're looking on, is Kamala Harris in a pantsuit, and the other, to the left as we look on, is a generic news person doing the interview. There should be a coffee table between them, with a coffee cup on each side so that each would have something to drink if they needed it. Assume that the two are being recorded for television, so it is not necessary for there to be a visible microphone or any note-taking material.

And yes, if you're paying attention, it didn't take all of my instructions. The result was not a silhouette, for example. It just confirms that these tools are not as good as people often say. They make mistakes. Sometimes really conspicuous ones. But this was the best I got after several attempts, and was good enough for this very flexible case. I still am not a big fan of these tools, both for their environmental footprint and because they confabulate freely. They don't really understand, just mimic. That it drew anything at all suggests there were probably other things humans had done that were close enough that it could crib from them. But I'll gripe in more detail about all this on another day.

The Sudden Importance of Truth

Out of Context and Out of Line

It is disingenuous and preposterous to nitpick Tim Walz over remarks that weren't even about him but about gun availability. It's doubtful he intentionally lied, hoping to mislead folks unchecked—he's a teacher. He knows that would never stand. But we all say things that don't come out exactly right, and if it's not our focus, we press on.

He did, after all, carry weapons. And there was a war going on. And his remarks here are not trying to suggest he's a war hero, they're trying to say he has sufficient experience and perspective to understand the difference between military need for assault rifles and civilian needs.

It's legitimate to debate the correct interpretation of the Constitution. Some people think that the Second Amendment is a right of the people to have sufficient firepower that they can take down an out-of-control government. I don't happen to agree with that. Taken seriously, it would amount to a right of private citizens to have nuclear weaponry, so I think the idea that citizens can keep parity with the government, if that's what it ever meant, was lost long ago. But it's a legitimate policy debate we could have. Debate Walz on that, if you want to, because that's what he was speaking to. This was not a discussion about his military record. It merely mentioned it in passing, in shorthand, to give context.

Likewise on the issue of when he retired, plenty of people retire at 20 years. It was his right to retire. He received an honorable discharge. That's really all that needs to be said.

No one's decision to retire after 24 years needs to be questioned. Full credit to Walz for answering graciously pointing this out.

Rules of Engagement

And, just to be clear on the debate rules here, what is the standard for misstatements? How many times does a candidate have to repeat a single ill-shaped, questionably worded, or not-quite-true statement, much less a Big Lie, in order that their honor is put in doubt or their campaign be disqualified?

Asking for a few friends (the US).

Because if there's a sudden renewed interest in the truth here, that is the real story. I was starting to think truth had atrophied from disuse.

Due Diligence

You know where I'm going. The Washington Post estimated 30,573 false or misleading statements by Trump while in office. Is that disqualifying? Is anything like that alleged of Walz?

Are we just talking military issues, JV? Should we talk bone spurs?

Exceptional Vision

Perhaps we should revisit Trump's later remarks about 9/11, as described in an ABC News article (bold mine for emphasis):

Trump Tower is located on 5th Avenue between 56th and 57th Streets, a little more than four miles away from ground zero.
…
“I have a window in my apartment that specifically was aimed at the World Trade Center, because of the beauty of the whole downtown Manhattan. And I watched as people jumped, and I watched the second plane come in,” he said then. “Many people jumped, and I witnessed that. I watched that.”

And from that same article (again, bold mine):

At the time, he noted “many of those affected were firefighters, police officers, and other first responders,” and then claimed, “and I was down there also, but I’m not considering myself a first responder. But I was down there. I spent a lot of time down there with you.”

And from an article linked by that one (bold mine):

Trump's claim that he saw television reports of people in New Jersey celebrating the attacks has been discredited. He stood by that claim on the campaign trail last year.

There is probably more I could say if The Washington Post’s “30,573” number is even remotely right. (Will we be holding them to the same precision as you want to hold Walz to, or the relaxed precision you reserve for your boss?)

But maybe we could pause here for a response.

 

---

Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This essay originated as a thread on the ex-bird site. It has been edited to fit the richer format of this venue, and expanded to include additional content not in the original thread.